United States Politics Thread 46

[jcb]

Doesn't that require a lot of fussy bookkeeping? Maybe, but it would be built in, invisible to the customer, and it would be no more intrusive or difficult than the tracking that underlies the ad network. (Some visibility is good, e.g. on your monthly bill, so you can adjust your usage.)

ISPs already track how data a customer downloads from a specific website.

Would creators and hosts get a say in how much they get paid per page/kB? After all, the money that is spent on a Patreon subscription gets spent by the creator on things besides just internet hosting costs, like food, rent, etc.

[zompist]

Doesn't that require a lot of fussy bookkeeping? Maybe, but it would be built in, invisible to the customer, and it would be no more intrusive or difficult than the tracking that underlies the ad network. (Some visibility is good, e.g. on your monthly bill, so you can adjust your usage.)

Would creators and hosts get a say in how much they get paid per page/kB? After all, the money that is spent on a Patreon subscription gets spent by the creator on things besides just internet hosting costs, like food, rent, etc.

You could certainly do it that way, but then you need some sort of consumer signaling. Like, if a website charges double, links to it are in a different color or something. You'd probably want to do something like that anyway for streaming sites (since the amount of data is many time that of a static web page).

[Nortaneous]

But there can be two reasons why you still get some enshittification. One is that the service gets money from both customers and advertisers, so it's a mixed product. And two, enshittification is probably taught in business school by now. When all the big tech companies are doing it, CEOs think that it must be the smart thing to do.

Third, sometimes it's the end of the dreamtime. Companies can't give away dollars for 75 cents to attract a userbase forever - eventually they have to either become profitable or run out of money and die - nor can market-dominant products avoid shaping ecosystems around themselves. In some cases, the relationship between an ecosystem-defining product and its ecosystem is positive (e.g. Amazon and AWS consultants); in others, it's competition between a big company with many verticals and small companies with one vertical (e.g. Nintendo and MadCatz); and in others, it's so adversarial that in the limit both ecosystem and defining product will die. IIRC, one of the type specimens of enshittification is Google Search, but for it not to enshittify, the central planners at Google would have to consistently stay ahead of the whole SEO market.

I think the future of search (if it has a future) will look more like web scrapers selling access to their firehose to search companies (there's no reason for these to be integrated!) than like a monopoly whose bear case is the history of the USSR. Bing and Yahoo are probably already doing this, and Reddit tried. But a lot depends on developments in recently created markets for web scrapers.

[Torco]

it's like the financial sector but for data!

[Raphael]

When I was a small child, capitalism won the First Cold War by being better at providing consumer goods than the Soviet system.

What good are consumer goods if one can't afford housing, education, or healthcare?

Not much. My point wasn't that capitalism is so great, but that it used to be better at producing consumer goods than it is now. However, most capitalist countries were traditionally pretty good at producing housing, education, and healthcare.

[Ares Land]

Actually, the Minitel was far ahead of its time.

How?

It meant the general public had access to online services, years before the web. More specifically, there was a combination of good infrastructure and right choices. Specifically the terminals were cheap enough that I believe the phone company provided them for free (with a reasonable security deposit.)

When I was a small child, capitalism won the First Cold War by being better at providing consumer goods than the Soviet system.

What good are consumer goods if one can't afford housing, education, or healthcare?

Sounds surprising now, but at the time, people in capitalist countries could afford all three!

[MacAnDàil]

@Emily:If you disagree with the Democrats on the basis of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, how do you square the PSL's position on North Korea and Russia Today?

In both our countries, a lot of the economy was planned (or at least regulated) 20 years ago -- in ways you sometimes don't really notice. I think the big push towards deregulation actually started in the late 80s/90s, but in 2004 it may still have been too early to see the consequences.

I don't know how to explain the US though! One thing I don't understand, for instance, is why the Silicon Valley used to be able to turn out good products in the 2000s and 2010s -- Gmail, Google Maps, even Twitter (which, surprising as it may seem, was an interesting place and not a huge troll farm back in the days). Now we get good stuff once and again, but let's admit it, it's mostly drivel.

I'd say capitalism, whatever else you might think about it, can be quite good at providing things we use in daily life as long as the average capitalist is content with running a business on razor-thin profit margins. That used to be the case, but it no longer is, or at least not to the same extent. More and more, capitalists insist not just on profits, but on constantly growing profits, or at least constantly growing revenues. This means that they have basically forgotten how to run a saturated market.

If you start out with a business that is profitable, but just barely so, and you want to turn it into a very profitable business, your only options are either cutting costs, which inevitably hurts quality, or rising prices, which hurts your customers, too. Unless you're an established luxury brand, the only way to run a business that is very, as opposed to barely, profitable is to sell overpriced crap.

(In theory, when businesses do that, they should lose market share to competitors who don't do that, but in practice, if all the businesses are run by the same kind of person, with the same personality type and the same set of priorities, this particular corrective mechanism stops working.)

Indeed, probably overpriced and overmarketed crap, which underlines how adverts are over-ubiquitous, especially compared to actual knowledge. To bring things back on-topic, the decision to remove campaign finance limits was an awful idea. But advertising limits should be put into place to, similar to those that are still in place in other countries for political campaigns.

[MacAnDàil]

PS Here's Bernie Sanders' take on voting Harris and Gaza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY

[Travis B.]

PS Here's Bernie Sanders' take on voting Harris and Gaza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY

I agree with that 100%.

[Torco]

Not much. My point wasn't that capitalism is so great, but that it used to be better at producing consumer goods than it is now. However, most capitalist countries were traditionally pretty good at producing housing, education, and healthcare.

only the first thing is true: as far as the second, this was only ever true for a small set of the capitalist countries, and for only some groups within those countries. not most, then, but some, though these days even the core is cracking.

[jcb]

Not much. My point wasn't that capitalism is so great, but that it used to be better at producing consumer goods than it is now. However, most capitalist countries were traditionally pretty good at producing housing, education, and healthcare.

When you say this, I feel like you must be describing Mars or Jupiter. A world where a normal person can afford housing, education, and healthcare (and maybe even a child!) sounds like a paradise compared to how things are now.

As for producing consumer goods, I agree that the capitalist countries have done a better job at it, even now. For example, TVs are cheaper and better now than even just 10 years ago, but again, what good is being able to buy a 75-inch TV for 500$ when you live under a bridge, or can't afford insulin, or are 250,000$ in student debt?

[Nortaneous]

High housing costs are a deliberate policy goal of a regulatory regime that enjoys a strong base of support from both the propertied class and - noting that "this neighborhood contains only those who can afford it" is a rare exception to the rule that offering explicit and enforceable differentiators of the product class "neighborhood" other than material infrastructure is extremely illegal - discriminating buyers of one-time-purchase and subscription-service housing. (It's not uncommon for right-leaning YIMBYs to accidentally stumble upon illuminating examples of the principle that certain things society values, such as low housing prices, may be traded off against others, such as unenforceability of restrictive covenants, as well as the principle that, due to certain legal precedents in areas of e.g. employment law, it is not a matter of personal opinion which of these takes priority when they conflict.) The rising cost of education is harder to account for and there have been a number of proposals, including the expansion of administrative staff (which itself can be a deliberate policy goal if you pronounce it "job creation") and Baumol's cost disease, but IMO an underrated one is that college as a product class has less in common with tutoring (which is surprisingly affordable in comparison) than it does with country clubs. I don't think capitalism enters into it.

There are valid critiques of capitalism as it relates to consumer goods, but they're different. I wish I could exchange a thousand dollars (if necessary) for a pair of good, durable shoes that properly fit my feet, but as far as I've been able to tell, this is not possible, because whatever market existed for (necessarily expensive) shoes handmade by people who knew what they were doing in the past has been wiped out by capitalism's ability to invent a new product category of affordable, mass-produced shoes that don't fit. This "low end chases out high" issue is not the case in all product categories - there are still tailored shirts, and the price isn't even that bad compared to upper-middle off-the-rack - but it's very annoying when it happens. (Household appliances are another example - you can get a high-quality espresso maker, but is there even such a thing as a high-quality dishwasher?)

[jcb]

I wish I could exchange a thousand dollars (if necessary) for a pair of good, durable shoes that properly fit my feet, but as far as I've been able to tell, this is not possible, because whatever market existed for (necessarily expensive) shoes handmade by people who knew what they were doing in the past has been wiped out by capitalism's ability to invent a new product category of affordable, mass-produced shoes that don't fit.

https://anyasreviews.com/best-barefoot-shoes-foot-type/

I also suffered from unnecessary foot pain for over a decade.

There's no reason why "normal" mass-produced shoes (Nike, Adidas, etc) couldn't be shaped better. I think that the main problem is that what people accept as a "normal" shaped foot is just wrong, and they don't realize it, because it's the only thing they've ever seen.

[zompist]

I wish I could exchange a thousand dollars (if necessary) for a pair of good, durable shoes that properly fit my feet, but as far as I've been able to tell, this is not possible, because whatever market existed for (necessarily expensive) shoes handmade by people who knew what they were doing in the past has been wiped out by capitalism's ability to invent a new product category of affordable, mass-produced shoes that don't fit.

You may just be on the wrong continent. Peter Mayle once wrote a book, Acquired Tastes, where he tried out various luxury goods. One of them was handmade shoes, personally fit in London, for something like $1300. He said they were fantastic: they fit well, weighed half of what a store-bought shoe does, and lasted forever. Admittedly the book is 30 years old, so check with a rich British friend that you can still do this before buying plane tickets.

[Lērisama]

I haven't personally done this, but I'm sure I've heard the the company that makes the shoes for Srictly Come Dancing (celebrity dancing show, national institution. For obvious reasons good quality, non-painful shoes are needed) used to make Bruce Forsyth's (ex presenter of Strictly, along with many other things, now dead. Another national institution). I believe lasts (foot moulds) were mentioned, so it might be worth checking companies that make posh dancing shoes out for something similar.

[Raphael]

Not much. My point wasn't that capitalism is so great, but that it used to be better at producing consumer goods than it is now. However, most capitalist countries were traditionally pretty good at producing housing, education, and healthcare.

When you say this, I feel like you must be describing Mars or Jupiter. A world where a normal person can afford housing, education, and healthcare (and maybe even a child!) sounds like a paradise compared to how things are now.

As for producing consumer goods, I agree that the capitalist countries have done a better job at it, even now. For example, TVs are cheaper and better now than even just 10 years ago, but again, what good is being able to buy a 75-inch TV for 500$ when you live under a bridge, or can't afford insulin, or are 250,000$ in student debt?

Note that I wrote most capitalist countries, not all of them. There is one fairly blatant outlier, of course, and unfortunately, most of the others are moving in the direction of that outlier.

[Torco]

again, are the entirety of africa, asia, the middle easy and latin america not capitalist countries? it's not most by a longshot

[Raphael]

again, are the entirety of africa, asia, the middle easy and latin america not capitalist countries? it's not most by a longshot

OK, good point. I somehow mentally associated "capitalist" with "rich". I'll try to avoid that in the future.

[Torco]

then again, i guess it would make sense to speak of countries being capitalist vs capitalized or something. point is norway is norway cause nigeria is nigeria, so it's not like the old capitalism -which was in many ways just objectively better, i grant that totally- maximizes in general the fulfillment of basic needs like housing healthcare blabla, it just used to do so for a bigger minority than it does now.

[zompist]

then again, i guess it would make sense to speak of countries being capitalist vs capitalized or something. point is norway is norway cause nigeria is nigeria,

Damn Norwegian Empire, why doesn't it free its Nigerian colonies???

so it's not like the old capitalism -which was in many ways just objectively better, i grant that totally- maximizes in general the fulfillment of basic needs like housing healthcare blabla, it just used to do so for a bigger minority than it does now.

Um, no it didn't. It feels like it did, but the facts are pretty much the opposite.

E.g., homeownership rate in the US-- 1940: 43.6%. 1960: 61.9%. 2024: 65.60%.
Percentage without health insurance in the US-- 1940: 80%. 1960: 30%. 2024: 8%.

Oh, but we can't just look at the US, we need to look at poor countries. OK, per capita GNP, inflation adjusted, from the World Bank:
India-- 1960, $83. 2023: $2,485.
China-- 1960, $90. 2023: $12,615.
Nigeria-- 1960, $93. 2023: $1,621.
Peru-- 1960, $827. 2023: $7,790.

Or, "extreme poverty", i.e. "$2.15 poverty threshold in 2017 PPP"-- the global rate in 1950: 58.5%. In 2020: 8.1%.

The world is fucked up in many many ways, but a bad mood is not data.